Odd and Flawed Sausage-like Recipes from An Early Northern Cookery Book

Next, take a pork caul and put it on a pot. Grind lean meat in a mortar, add eggs and white bread. Place this in that caul, sprinkled with herbs. Add bacon, [diced] small. Take hens and all kinds of preserving seasonings; chop them small, with the liver and giblets of the chickens too. Then compress that filling into a lump and bind it together with bands made from its intestines. Roast it well. Cut it into morsels, as game. Make a sour syrup for it.

The editors (Grewe and Heiatt) suspect that this may be two recipes mixed together, or garbled in some other way. They speculate that the sour sauce might be something like egredouce. I suspect that it may be a variant on the third recipe (below) which has been compared to Chiquart’s parti-coloured sausage.

A Grilled Cake with Chicken Filling (W70)

Next, take eggs and flour. Make it into a thin dough: onto a gridiron, pour [the] eggs beaten with flour. Roast hens, and take all the meat from the bones. Chop the hens with other meat, pound them in a mortar, adding eggs and bacon. Place this on that sheet. Press into it the bones from the hen drumsticks. Sprinkle this with eggs, saffron, and other herbs.

The authors found this strange too, because the batter would be too thin to support the chicken mixture while it all cooks on a gridiron. I would do the recipe with a griddle pan to get something like crepes, then wrap them around the mounds of chicken, stick in a drumstick, coat with the eggs and spices, and then bake until done. It would be a form of sausage on a stick.

Pancake with a Sausage Filling (W71)

Next, take eggs and beat them, and take three large intestines of a swine. Fill one full with parsley and eggs, another with eggs without yolks and with bacon, the third with yoks and saffron. [Cook] them in a kettle until they are hard; then [remove] the casing and slice [the sausages]. Make a thin sheet of eggs in a pan. Place [the egg sausages] in this, alternating one yellow, one green, one white. Make a red lung mush and put it on top of this. Over all this, place on top a sheet made of well beaten eggs with flour that….

This recipe is incomplete, but appears to be feasible. Melitta Weiss Adamson cites the Vienna Codex 4995 as a source for a lung mush recipe and some of them, containing blood, could be red. I have found a 16th C Max Rumpolt recipe that refers to lung mush, but not how to make it (recipe 138 suggests using morels instead of lungs: http://home.earthlink.net/~al-tabbakhah/misc/23GermanMushroomRecipes.html).

To instruct the person who will be making the Mortoexes, he should get kid and calf crows and was and clean them very well and put them to cook in good clean water; when they have cooked enough, take them out onto good clean work-tables and drain them well, then chop them up very small; when they are all chopped up, add in herbs, that is to say, sage and hyssop – both in moderation – and marjoram, too, and a great deal of parsley which has been culled, cleaned and washed; chop them into the meat, and very good cheese as well, though not too much, and salt, too, and spices: white ginger, grains of paradise, pepper – not too much – and saffron to give it color; then get eggs and add them in. Mix all of that together, and then, when it is boiling, make the Mortoexes. See that he has kid and calf cauls – and if there are not enough, get sheep cauls – and make sure they are good and clean, then stretch them out on good clean wooden tables; when they are stretched, get eggs and rub them on them. When this is done, get the filling, put it on them, and make the Mortoexes in the same way as ravioli (see below): wrap them up in the cauls, and then put them to cook on the grill. And if he should want to make them party-colored, that is, in green and yellow: for the green he should get a lot of parsley, enough for the quantity he would like to make green, take the leaves, wash them well then put them in the mortar and grind them strongly; then he should add in some flour and some eggs in an amount for the quantity he wants to make, then strain that very carefully; when this is done, he should take the Mortoexes he wants to make green and drop them into that green mixture and move them around in it, then return them to dry on the grill. When they have dried and are ready, these Mortoexes are served up when it is time to serve them.